Agreed, I try to use antcall as little as possible. It also tends to eat up memory if you have a ton of antcall tasks in a large build framework.
Macrodefs are a nice substitute, but they really need an "if/else" attribute. I find that I often have targets that are just wrappers for macrodef or use antcontrib's if/else tasks to accomplish this. -----Original Message----- From: Dominique Devienne [mailto:ddevie...@gmail.com] Sent: Friday, July 08, 2011 10:50 AM To: Ant Users List Subject: Re: Equivalent: <ant On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 10:27 AM, Perrier, Nathan <nperr...@ptc.com> wrote: > No, because antcall creates a new project underneath the hood, whereas runtarget (antcontrib task) does not. I would add that <runtarget> (and <antcall> as well in fact) goes against the Ant philosophy of having declarative builds using targets with proper dependencies between them, where by "dependencies" I mean that target just state their "requirements" and should not care when or in which order those requirements are fulfilled, since that's the job of the "dependency manager" to analyze the graph of targets and order them such that each one runs only once and in the proper order, detecting circular references. Targets are not functions that one would call at will, leading to procedural as opposed to declarative builds. <macrodef> usage should eliminate the need for most <runtarget> usage and is preferred in general. In more practical terms, <antcall> does indeed create a new project (i.e. a new "scope"), which means that any property it sets will not be visible to the build that used <antcall>. <runtarget> does not create a new Project, so all properties set *are* visible to the "caller", and it achieves that via a loophole in Ant's API which is not plugged for backward-compatibility reasons. Using <antcall> and <runtarget> is IMHO a symptom of using Ant and builds with a wrong (procedural) mindset. I've created lots of large and complex builds in the past without any, so it's certainly not necessary to idiomatic Ant usage, although it remains quite popular to many :) My $0.02. --DD > -----Original Message----- > From: Steve Amerige [mailto:steve.amer...@sas.com] > > Are the two statements below equivalent? > <antcall target="doit" InheritRefs="true" /> > <runtarget target="doit" /> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: user-h...@ant.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: user-unsubscr...@ant.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: user-h...@ant.apache.org
